I have too many computers to deal with here. What started out as a lab/learning experience has become more of a penance.
I have 2 machines running FreeBSD, 2 running NetBSD (one x86 laptop and one old PowerMac), a Mac running OS X, and an iMac running MacOS 9. The Macs, true to form, take the least care and feeding, but I seem to be always finding things to do on the *BSD machines. Not that need to be done, just that can be done. Like I need more distractions.
I am in the process of upgrading both of the machines to the 4.5-STABLE release and I seem to have missed some steps along the way. Fortunately, I have one I can screw up before I work on the one that counts (my firewall/gateway machine).
Over the past couple of weeks, I have bagged a SCSI card and a tape drive on Ebay, so I’ll be installing those so I can back some stuff up. I could get more disk space, but experience tells me disk space doesn’t get used for backups: there needs to be some intrinsic inconvenience in accessing the media (in this case, sequential access tape is pretty darn unaccomodating). Otherwise the storage gets used for live data. Now I just have to locate some tapes and start using them.